March 2024
Caesura Presents…Carolyn Hembree
Carolyn Hembree is the author of For Today, Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, and Skinny. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans.
Website: https://carolynhembree.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carolyn.hembree.nola
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolynahembree/
“Inheritances”
John:
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about your meditative, grounded yet revelatory new collection, For Today! This incredible collection explores so many emotional and potent themes, it’s difficult to know where to start. But I feel the exploration of inheritances permeates every poem, as if the poems themselves are being passed down generations: from family, ancestors, and our shared ghosts to our impact on the earth itself. How do your poems speak to the comparison of human and natural “inheritances?”
Carolyn:
Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to our conversation. Though I wouldn't have put my finger on "inheritances" as unifying the poems, it makes great sense. Having lived inside the work for ten years, my argument with myself (to paraphrase Yeats) did revolve around genetic, literary, terrestrial, and otherworldly inheritances. As a New Orleanian, Anthropocene climate change shapes daily life; last night, we moved the cars to high ground and watched the street flood, i.e., turn into a fast-moving creek, during a rainstorm. In the morning, we gathered trashcans and flowerpots that had floated away. Multiple times a year, cars, houses, and storefronts flood. All this to say, what nature inherits from us and vice versa is writ large. As a poet, place has always interested me, so these realities are part of experiencing the world. In a recent conversation with you about her book Exploding Head, Cynthia Marie Hoffman recalls hearing the eighth of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet on the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack and feeling that "if you listen to your sadness, it will teach you something." I like that. As a literary inheritance from my father, Rilke's poetry, especially the Duino Elegies, became a way of trying to remember and revive our relationship. Unlike what I understand from Rilke, I believe the dead do need us and that our relationships with the dead (human, animal, earth) continue to evolve after death. Also, as a mother and a woman, Inger Christensen's alphabet, an appropriately incomplete abecedarium that progresses like the Fibonacci numeric sequence, is a newer literary inheritance that I engage with in my poetry.
John:
What a rich, exploratory answer; thank you. There’s so much I’d love to ask based just on your answer!
To start, I’d like to consider the merging ideas of unity and transformation. So many of your poems include what I’d call transfiguration, a rather beautiful recreation of forms. Nothing is only one thing in your work. A perfect example is from your poem “Nocturne,” which begins:
My daughter molds a gun from bread.
Why do gods make us eat?
Here’s so very much to unpack in so few words. Implications about a deeply felt familial relationship. Immense questions of religion in both the “bread” and “gods.” How do you weave so many ideas so succinctly in a way that reads so accessibly and (strangely) familiar?
Carolyn:
Though it's so obvious now, I didn't think about the religious significance of "bread"! Can you believe that? As for the gods, a mythological thread (not quite a motif, maybe) emerged at some point. My hope was that "Nocturne," the third poem in the book, would introduce that thread, which then peeks through subsequent mother-daughter poems. "Nothing is only one thing" —yes! This quality you describe initially drew me to poetry and continues to delight me as a reader of Japanese court women's poetry, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Katie Ford, Aracelis Girmay, and Tonya Foster.
Though I learn from poets who use more representational language, the paradoxical, plastic, elliptical, coded, and allusive have always enthralled me. To answer your question, if I am successful in my weaving, it is because of what I love. Similar to my experience writing other pseudo-formal poems in this book, I enjoyed trying to create a contracted and hyper-pigmented universe with "Nocturne."
When I was a kid, my granny wound her German watch nightly before zipping it inside a prodigious black leather bag, which she hid in her bureau under her undergarments. (The house was robbed several times, but the watch never taken.) On the rare occasion that I wound the watch, she would warn me against "overwinding." A more confined poem like "Nocturne" I think of as a watch wound so tightly that just one more click would break the overspring.
John:
What a perfect answer to transition into my next question: your exploration of family dynamics. There’s so much grief, love, frustration, uncertainty in your poems, especially those involving motherhood and your father’s passing. My own children were born just a year after my own mother’s passing, so I can empathize with that difficult juxtaposition. Can you tell me a bit about how such uncertain times filled with both painful and joyous contrasts has inspired this book?
Carolyn:
I am sorry about your mother's death and that she never met your children and vice versa. Especially when the parent's death is so awfully close to the birth of one's child or children, that near-miss tempts us to correct the timeline. At least that's how I felt when I was six months pregnant with my only child and my mother's long-term illness worsened and my father died suddenly. In the opening sonnet crown, "Some Measures," an elegy addressed to my father, I collaged lyrics and poetry that held special significance to us; that's the language we spoke—rather than say he was scared in the hospital, he sang The Fugs' "Wide Wide River." I got it. So, the initial section of the book takes place with the speaker talking to her father—still grieving him—while tending to her newborn. With the second section of the book, I attempt to take on the speaker's relationship to her daughter but also her relationship with her mother. I think of "La Dictée" as a kind of anti-elegy that explores furious grief for the speaker's adored, mentally ill, and drug-addicted mother. Drafted in one sitting, the poem took the shape of a villanelle, my favorite form that I hope begins to relay the suffocating and relentless experience of witnessing a parent's self-destruction. Always a poet, I've spent most my life in rumination or anticipation, but as the collection progresses, the mother-daughter poems skew more toward the present moment with speaker and child, the present moment inside their home in the Gulf South. And with that present moment comes the joy, heartache, and humdrum of living as fully as possible.
On a recent radio show, I heard a citizen of a hurricane-devastated area say, "That is the price I pay for living in paradise." The statement resonated with me, but then I also thought that in my two decades in New Orleans, the who and how much seem to depend a great deal on race, gender, and class. Given our history, any poem that evokes the flora, fauna, and community of southeast Louisiana evokes grief and deep, ugly disparities: our storm-damaged homes, swamp fires, and disappearing wetlands. Yet, when the river is high, an alligator might walk the levee. Yet, a surviving crawfish may scurry from a mound of shells. I know where the wild parrots nest. I know the neighborhood peacock named Pete. My home is a miracle.
John:
Well, you not only answered my last question…but the one I planned on asking next…about how you envision climate change in your work. Both the familial and natural read as if they’re coming from the same place of hurt, longing, and love in your work.
Instead, I’d like to ask about your use of so many formal and innovative structures. From sonnets to villanelles, odes to prose poems, you use so many different forms to expand your vision. How did this come about?
Carolyn:
After writing for some decades, I've started to understand my strengths and weaknesses though I try not to think on them overmuch. Whether reading, writing, or living, I have always struggled to "see the forest for the trees," as they say. In fact, I wonder if this phenomenon is common to poets (not a hypothesis, just a wonder). I will inspect, name, and rename the varieties of lichen but can't point you in a cardinal direction even as we watch the sun set over a distant timberline. Luckily, New Orleanians don't use cardinal directions but lakeside, riverside—all relative to the water. Even in my juvenilia, I glommed onto imagery, atmosphere, a sonically coherent line, and tonal shifts but went flat-footed with structure and design—the scheme for the individual poem as well as a collection of poems. Of course, this is a massive deficiency, which may be why I prefer not to think about it, as structure and design are inextricable from rhetoric and the larger music. To answer your question, fixed forms taught me how to perceive the contour of a poem and the history (for good and ill) behind a particular structure. For some of the poems in this manuscript, such as the villanelle and the sonnet crown, content was wedded to form from the start. For others, such as the sonnet "Nocturne," I used form as a revision strategy because structure challenged me. I wrote the haiku to break myself from the highly subjective elements of the manuscript. Though I am proud of the nonce structure of the long poem, seeing that forest took five years. Prose just comes around in my practice now and again. In James Longenbach's The Art of the Poetic Line, one of my favorite craft texts, he discusses Yeats writing in prose to think through subject, development, and design with "The Fascination of What's Difficult," for example. Of course, Yeats then translated the work into verse. I enjoy practicing and reading prose poetry as a shift in mode though I love the line too much to fully give over to prose for long. Hell, maybe that will change. I hope to change.
John:
Given how many of your poems explore parenthood, how has your writing and perspective changed since become a mother and as Kiddo has aged?
Carolyn:
Before I had my child, a dear friend, New Orleans poet Andy Young, told me that being a mother made her "less precious" with her time and that she had begun writing in shorter increments and amid family goings-on. Similarly, when leading a community workshop at Tulane University, Kimiko Hahn told us that she started writing shorter poems for the practical reason that she had less free time due to family commitments. During my high-risk pregnancy, which was further complicated by factors such as my father's death, my mother's worsening illness, a car accident, and an arterial tumor that couldn't be removed until after I delivered, I pretty much stopped writing. The same thing happened in the months following Katrina. While I envy poets who write in the face of trauma, I tend to soldier through, which doesn't allow for the vulnerability and open heart that writing requires of me. What a relief though to have my baby outside of my body, this inhospitable vessel! Almost immediately, I was able to write again. Like so many parents, uncles, aunties, and mentors who are writers, watching a child grasp language deeply interested me. In The Art of Syntax—I love that Graywolf series!—Ellen Bryant Voigt tells of a beloved toddler's speech that "the string of sounds belongs not yet to meaningful speech but to song" (4). Of course, Andy was correct too; I squeeze in writing when, where, and how I can. I write a good bit in carpool lanes now.
John:
I love The Art of Syntax, and the entire series, too. Apart from books on writing, what are some of the poetry collections that have most influenced your own work? And what are a few of your favorite more recent collections?
Carolyn:
During the years that I wrote the title poem, "For Today," Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Christensen’s Alphabet obsessed me. Over the course of my life, I've been most influenced by middle and late Emily Dickinson, late Paul Celan, Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, C.D. Wright's book-length projects, Syliva Plath's Ariel and Winter Trees, Etheridge Knight's Selected, D.A. Powell's trilogy, James Schuyler's Morning of the Poem, Charles Wright's Zone Journals, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, John Berryman's Dream Songs, Stéphane Mallarmé's A Tomb for Anatole, Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. Most recently, I've loved Wanda Coleman's Wicked Enchantment (selected), Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony, my teacher Jane Miller's new book Paper Banners, Sara Lefsyk's We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds, Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer's Ethel chap Small Geometries, and New Orleans poets Karisma Price's I'm Always So Serious, Jerika Marchan's Swole and Stacey Balkun's Sweetbitter.
John:
Thanks so much for introducing us to these poets!
Finally, now that your For Today is entering the world, what’s next for you? Are you working on a new project? Are you able to tour at all for this book? What does 2024 have in store for you creatively?
Carolyn:
Pretty easily spooked as a writer, I didn't talk to anybody about the title poem of For Today until I finished the first draft, which took several years. Right now, I'm in a deep state of unknowing that a fiction friend of mine describes as driving on a winding country road with the headlights off, a stunt a girlfriend and I pulled in ninth grade and got caught despite rolling the odometer back on her mom's car. As a more seasoned writer, I prefer revision, while the necessary but more reckless early process makes me uneasy.
Thanks to some generous hosts and my understanding family, I will enjoy a book tour this spring. Of course, everything kicks off at home in New Orleans. On March 8, I'll read at Bar Redux for the LMNL Lit's launch of Dylan Krieger's newest collection. On March 23, I'll participate on a panel for the Tennessee Williams Festival. At the end of the month, I'm heading to New York to see friends and read at the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series on March 25, then at Book Culture with Neil Shepard and Terese Svoboda on March 28. In April, I'll participate in the Delta Mouth Literary Festival in Baton Rouge and the New Orleans Poetry Festival. More details about these and other events are listed on my website: www.carolynhembree.com